Even if you saturated the available 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrum you'd be lucky to even come close to 1gbps total throughput for all the wireless devices with 2 AP's and that would mostly come from 802.11ac devices on 5GHz.

The pfsense box would presumably be your router so it wouldn't be using any bandwidth itself. If you're trying to say it would be acting as a server then your ISP would have a talk with you if it used any significant traffic.

A PC Engines APU1C can "route" (NAT/gateway) around 6-700mbit/sec with pfSense on a 1GHz AMD A-series CPU with no hardware acceleration. That's nothing, hardware-wise. It has Realtek network cards which aren't great from a performance standpoint. I don't disagree that 10G+ service is going to take a fair bit of hardware compared to average home "router" hardware, but that's because those boxes are trash for the most part.

London has the same problem... Old infrastructure, nowhere to locate street cabinets and very difficult to get permission to do any work in the street coupled with relatively few residential customers. Central London is mostly business users, and given the rates these businesses pay for their offices they can afford to have dedicated fibre lines installed.

If you want malls, freeways, and fiber, live in town.If you want wide open spaces, live out in the country.

If you insist on having a fiber line run two miles across your neighbors' pastures to reach you, the only interested customer on your road, you can get that too. That two miles of trenching and fiber work isn't going to be cheap - I've priced it.

Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?

I'm making the assumptions that the link speed you're sold is actually the speed you get and that there are no resource constraints, artificial or real, that would stop you from utilizing the maximum bandwidth.

Do most web sites have per-connection caps on how fast any one connection can download files or data? Could you mount a file store on AWS or any other cloud storage provider and use it like a local NAS disk?

Most top websites are just running large arrays of cheap hardware behind load balancers and the majority of websites are on shared/virtual hosting. The problem with ultra-fast residential connections is that most servers can't saturate it.

Assuming that you connect to servers that can saturate it, SATA3 is only 6Gbps so it would actually have more throughput than a typical SSD but your latency would be much higher.

Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?

That would depend on the price, wouldn't it? If the marginal cost of 10 Gbps vs 1 Gbps is negligible, by all means, provide 10 Gbps. 10 Gbps ethernet over copper (for use within the residence to be able to take advantage of this speed) is still at the margins in terms of price, but that's mostly for the same reasons that 1 Gbps was so expensive for so long. If only "enterprise" uses it, it stays expensive, because business, as always, charges all the traffic will bear, and business customers like to pay more because they think that means they're getting something valuable.

Once residences started using 1 Gbps, the price dropped and dropped and dropped and now you can get a very good quality 24 port 1 Gbps ethernet switch for less than $100. 10 Gbps will follow the same trajectory, but the demand has to be there. This is the first move towards creating that demand.

Other people have pointed out that the server side won't talk to you at 10 Gbps anyway. You're throttled by the server at far lower than that. I've pointed it out myself for the past few years. But we know that the backbone bandwidth is in the ground, unlit, to support far higher outbound throughput from data centers. There's just no demand, and it saves on server hardware. Again, this is a move towards creating demand.

Somebody has to be first, and it has to be on the demand side. This is one of the first, at least in the US.

The question is if your diminishing return is less than their diminishing return. My impression is that with fiber connections you have a fairly high cost just because they need to maintain a fiber line, end point equipment, maintenance, service, support, billing and so on. From there they usually offer huge leaps in speed for relatively modest price gains, often like double the speed for 15-20% price gains and that shit multiplies. I could pay about 75% of my current rate to have 20 Mbit instead of 100 Mbi

I have 175 Mbps symmetric at home, and it's good enough for my purposes at the moment. Having reasonable upload bandwidth like that with 3 ms ping to the office is useful for exporting X apps to my work desktop (yes, I do that). It's nearly as fast as a local app to the point where I could forget it's remote.

The decent upload is also really handy for doing remote backups. I have ISCSI targets in distant locations that I simply mount and use like a local file system. ISCSI without reasonable upload capacity

My daughter goes to UofMN and has a very painful 1Mb service in her apartment for $30/month! CL says they are looking to improve the offerings in her building but she is not holding her breath. We haven't been told we can NOT get other service BUT there is currently no other service in her area. No monopoly you say? Wish this service would work its way around the University.

I'm just over the border in Wisconsin and CenturyLink is my only wired choice too. They supposedly give us a 2M down/768K up connection, but I never have seen it. And they keep telling us that upgrades will be coming soon. They're actually not taking any more subscribers right now, due to saturation.

So I ended up getting rid of CL and just using a small hotspot for casual browsing. My neighbor does let me still use his CL connection via WiFi when I want to do anything big (like ISOs, and videos) though. O

I am having a hard time coming up with anyone that could take advantage of this. I would love gig coverage in my area. Even then, 80% of my internet activity happens on wireless which will not even come close to using 1Gbps let alone 10Gbps. On my wired connections, I occasionally hit my max of 50Mbps but, in most situations, the far end is still a limiter.

Large / medium business, sure. But a household of 4-6 people? Every one of them could be watching their own 4k content while simultaneously downl

Exactly. My home router is only 100 Mbps because i bought it a few year back and that's all they had for a decent price. None of my computers have 10 Gbps network cards in them. A quick google shows that a 10 Gbps network card costs around $400. Mind you I could run 10 computers, each at 1 Gbps, but I don't see how I would possibly use such a connection at home. I don't think I could really saturate 1 Gbps connection for any appreciable length of time. Even on my 30 Mbps connection we can stream multiple

right, but computers and end user network hardware is easy to replace over the year. The last mile wires aren't. So its nice to have around for when the technology arrives. The hard part will have been done.

It's called a philosophy change. We've been living under the current regime of minimal service just barely eeked up every few years always far behind what was capable and being told to take it or leave it (with no real option to leave to).

This is a company giving us far more than we need or want for a fairly reasonable cost. Yes most of their customers won't use that (or buy that... $400 a month is a bit pricy for your average home's internet needs) but compared to the Comcast/CenturyLink habits of overselling oversubscribed lines with not enough bandwidth for too much money and I'll take it!

My only complaint is they are staying south of Downtown. I live in NE Minneapolis and, at the moment, can't even get the CenturyLink service I used to have in South (I had 40/20 and now am relegated to 12M/860K... the DL is ok but that upload is *painful*)

People will find ways to use it. I remember multiple points in my life where I would get some new piece of technology (RAM, CPU speed, disk space, bandwidth, etc.) and remark that I couldn't possibly utilize it fully. Inevitably, I always reached a point where I was not only utilizing it, but I was aching for more.

A good historical example is streaming video. I never imagined watching movies and TV shows online when I had a 14.4 Kbps modem as a kid. Once broadband became popular, however, everyone start

So much for AT&T claiming that new net neutrality rules would financially hinder them from building out their fiber network!! If this tiny little company can role out 10 Gbps service, offer 1 Gbps service for $65/month, and be actively engaged on getting 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps rolled out in Minneapolis without having to charge companies like Netflix additional fees, then why can't a behemoth like AT&T do the same??

Part of it is because they're only rolled out to about 10 blocks of some of the most expensive homes in Minneapolis. With that said, hopefully they'll succeed and eventually get fiber out to the 'burbs.

Maybe the number is basically a gimmick. Almost nobody will have hardware that can eat faster than 1Gbps, but they'll feel cool that they could, if only they'd upgrade. So real bandwidth costs aren't really going to increase for the ISP, even if the data rate went up by an order of magnitude.

Are they going to drop into every customers home a router capable of 10Gbps of throughput? LOL. That would be expensive.

Not only the 10GbE switches are expensive ($100-200 per port) but the network cards are too. Making them work in a regular PC is a nightmare, most motherboards bus-fault and bluescreen / kernel panic in minutes.

Horrendous slap in the face to many who struggle to get anything useful. It would be nice to see the big players cut back on their FUD and actually provide the services their customers need at a fair price (novel concept).

We are lucky to have gotten 30/5 Mbps for $35 a month, the price shot up for the 50 and 100 Mbps tiers. However, having a big (or huge) pipe does almost no good when the backbone is puny compared to the need and we all sloooow down in the evening...

They are using an ethernet solution over fiber so the next steps above 10 are 40 and 100 gig. This is what you can do when you roll out a data network and not an overgrown cable tv network like all the xPON and FTTH, FTTP networks we keep hearing about.

While it's great to get super-fast Internet, we may run into a big problem soon: many web server farms may not have the bandwidth capacity to handle many millions of users who have above 100 megabit/second download speed Internet access at the "last mile" connection. It's going to require a major upgrade of content delivery networks to handle much faster connection end users.

I was lucky enough to have access to a home hookup on a lower USI tier for a while. It was of course far and away the best Internets around locally (altho now it's prompted CenturyLink to roll out). Coverage maps here http://fiber.usinternet.com/ [usinternet.com]

Another thing I loved was Comcast was forced to slash its rates in the covered zip codes dramatically, finally resembling a reasonable price. The solid upstream is very good for getting videos online, altho its true that the chokepoint winds up being the Youtube ser

...we just write out the individual bits on a post it note, throw it out the window and let the wind blow it to the nearest exchange, where trained koalas use 1800's era telegraph equipment to re-encode the traffic onto the Internet, for us. Because that's faster than the best Internet most of us will ever see.

You'll find that smaller ISPs (especially municipal and/or little fiber ISPs like this one) tend not to have data caps, and usually have big honking backhaul connections and peering just as the incumbants do - sometimes with as much bandwidth as the incumbants do (or at least MUCH more per subscriber).